Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > The White Lioness: A Mystery

”A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child has to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization.”


Kenneth Branagh is Wallander/

When a real estate agent turns up missing, Kurt Wallander of the Ystad Swedish police catches the case along with most of the department. They have a general idea of where she went missing, but they have few clues as to what has caused her disappearance. She and her husband are very religious, and Wallander finds himself thinking ”what it feels like to believe in God.”

As we learn more about Wallander, we realize there are good reasons why he is estranged from his ex-wife, his daughter, and his father. We also start to understand the frustrations that the other cops have working with him. He is bloody brilliant most of the time between those other moments of complete befuddlement. He has a single minded purpose in tracking down a missing woman, a killer, or solving a puzzle of a crime. If I were missing, I’d want Kurt Wallander trying to find me. He devotes himself so exclusively to a case that he has little time for those around him, or eating, or sleeping. He makes these leaps in logic that baffle his fellow police officers, but what they don’t realize is that while they are...having a life...Wallander is still ticking over the aspects of the case.

Wallander makes a breakthrough in the case, and this is one of those moments when time is of the essence, and he takes the day off to be with his daughter. He is trying to do the right thing, attempting to completely divorce himself from the case to pay attention to his daughter, but it turns into a missed opportunity. I, too, was frustrated with Wallander at this point.

They find the severed finger of a black man at the scene where they believe the real estate agent went missing. This turns out to be a digit that once belonged to Victor Mabatha of South Africa. This book came out in 1993 in Sweden and 1998 in an English translation, so apartheid was still fresh in everyone’s mind. During the course of the plot, Wallander and Mabatha intersect, and Victor gives this impassioned explanation for why he is the way he is, which is the quote I chose to lead this review with.

So a missing person case becomes a nonsensical international case somehow involving a planned assassination in South Africa. Why are these people in Sweden? Henning Mankill adds some additional spice to the plot with a demented, immoral Russian named Konovalenko. He runs the sole of his boot down the face of a person he just killed to close their eyes. Somehow that made me shudder more than the actual killing of the person. Maybe because we all deserve some semblance of reverence in death.

I would be a very considerate serial killer.

I found it interesting that Mankill takes us from the mind of Wallander to the political musings of several politicians in South Africa. We start to discover the extent of the conspiracy. The question is, can Wallander put the pieces together in time to obstruct a world tragedy?


That looks like the face of a man who put two and two together and got sixteen.

I hope most of you have had the chance to watch the spot on performance by Kenneth Branagh in the 12 episode BBC TV series. They scrambled the order of the books, which required some changes to the backstory, but not enough to bother me. I have a set of the Wallander books and plan to read them all. I set them aside to watch the TV series, which does break a half a dozen Keeten reading rules, but certainly seeing the TV episode of this book did not detract from my reading enjoyment. A story well told can be experienced many times with new insights with each retelling.

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